An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge Page A

black than brown and she wore woollen knee stockings; from a distance she could have been mistaken for a child, of either sex. Her name was Mary Deare and she had played the title role twice before; once in 1922 at the Scala Theatre, London, and again, fifteen years later, for the repertory company.
    She radiated a peculiar authority – they all felt it – yet when she spoke it was in a small, flat voice hardly above a whisper. Within a moment of her arrival St Ives put on the rimless spectacles he detested, though usually he preferred to squint blindly down at the book rather than be seen in them. Desmond Fairchild was the only one who addressed her directly, and even he removed his hat for the occasion, standing deferentially in front of her, head unaccustomedly bowed as she stood, pigeon-toed in ballet slippers, sipping her coffee at the foyer bar. According to Dotty, Fairchild, while still in short trousers, had played Slightly in the Scala production of 1922.
    George, who was to be in charge of the wires, having earlier walked round her as if he were the hangman measuring her for the drop, said Mary Deare would come into her own when she flew. She was built like a swallow. Secretly Stella thought Mary Deare resembled a monkey rather than a bird; it was those opaque, unblinking eyes.
    The read-through finished at midday to give St Ives a rest before the evening performance of Caesar and Cleopatra . Stella and Geoffrey stood in for the ‘lost boys’. In compliance with the licensing laws the children’s rehearsal wasn’t to be held until later in the afternoon. Not for another ten days would the Tiger Lily girls, recruited from Miss Thelma Broadbent’s school of tap-dancing at Crane Hall, put in an appearance.
    It went to Geoffrey’s head that he’d been cast as Mullins, the pirate. Somebody very distinguished had played the part in the last London production. When Meredith asked him to pop out for cigarettes, he replied vulgarly, ‘What did your last servant die of?’ He didn’t raise his voice but he intended to be heard. Meredith frowned, then smirked, and John Harbour, punching Geoffrey playfully on the shoulder, called out, ‘My, my! We are hoity-toity this morning.’
    Bunny told Stella that in addition to understudying Michael he wanted her to manage Tinkerbell. ‘What exactly does that entail?’ she asked. He explained she had to stand in the wings directing the beam of a torch at a strategically placed mirror which would send a reflection of light dancing across the back-cloth of Never-Never Land. At the same time she’d need to ring a little hand-bell. She expressed alarm at being in control of such a complicated procedure.
    ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Bunny assured her. ‘Surely, you were in the Girl Guides.’
    ‘They wouldn’t have me,’ she said crossly.
    ‘It’s rather like flashing signals from a convenient hilltop.’
    ‘I’ve an aversion to flickering lights,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d told you.’
    She wanted sympathy from Freddie Reynalde, but he wasn’t concentrating. ‘There’s something in my past,’ she confided, ‘which makes it difficult for me to confront night lights . . . something I can’t go into. Sufficient to say it’s the stuff of nightmares.’
    ‘You’re a bright girl,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ and he launched into a story concerning himself and P.L. O’Hara on a motorcycle ride to the Brontë sisters’ vicarage at Haworth. As far as she could tell it had no relevance to her own predicament. On the moors O’Hara had endeavoured to summon up Heathcliff, and a gust of wind from beyond the grave had blown the cycle off course and toppled them both into a ditch.
    Geoffrey, spying Stella mooning about the prop room, imagined she was upset because she was only an understudy.
    ‘In this precarious profession,’ he informed her, ‘one is lucky to have a foot in the door. It doesn’t do to get too big for one’s